At a panel at South By Southwest on Sunday,
Esmail said the hacking in “Mr. Robot” was informed by his own
“nerdy” adolescence, which included a poor attempt at hacking in
college that got him put on academic probation.

“I wanted to tell a story about that culture,”
he said, one that he was a peripheral part
of. Esmail said he wanted to include all
parts of hacker culture, the positives and the negatives,
including the loneliness and drug addiction that plagued some of
his friends.

That meant that the first stages of the show's
development revolved more around getting the character of Elliot
right than about the plot. But Esmail said
the real crystallization of Elliot’s character didn't
come from his childhood, but rather from the experience of
Esmail’s family in Egypt during
the Arab Spring civil uprisings of 2011.

Esmail, who is Egyptian-American, said that
before the Arab Spring he had the angst and social anxiety part
of Elliot’s character down. But when Esmail
visited his family right after the Arab Spring, he realized
that anger didn’t just have to be a negative emotion. It could
also be positive.

He saw his young cousins using technology to
actually make a difference in society, and made the distinction
between “angst” and “anger” in his mind, something that was
critical to charting the evolution of Elliot’s character, and the
arc of the entire show.